Early Scots-Episcopacy

*I originally posted this at my blog, but I thought that readers here might be interested in the topic as well.

While reading about the Aberdeen doctors, I discovered that they were all Episcopalians. I thought this was interesting because I usually associate Reformed versions of episcopacy with England rather than Scotland.

John Forbes of Corse was the most famous representative of the Aberdeen doctors, and he was exiled for his views. Indeed, it seems that the only position of which he could be found culpable in the eyes of the Scottish theologians was his refusal to sign the Solemn League and Covenant. The Covenanters deposed him from his teaching position at the university, took his house, exiled him to Holland, and even forbade him a burial alongside his family. Charming fellows they were.

It turns out that Robert Rollock also held to an episcopal form of church government, as he penned a work entitled Episcopal Government instituted by Christ, and confirmed by Scripture and Reason.

In fact, the first Book of Discipline put out by the Scottish Church in 1560 divided Scotland into 10 ecclesiastical districts, each with their own superintendent. This was the official form of government until 1592, when Melville succeeded in acquiring a Presbyterian form of government, though it only lasted for about twenty years. This stage of Prebyterianism never fully took over, as Aberdeen resisted it. Episcopacy was reinstated until the so-called second Reformation where the Covenanters claimed a divine right of presbyterian rule. The Aberdeen doctors made their stand against jure divino on the lawfully established forms of the Scottish Church, and they accused the Covenanters of innovation and rebellion.

Geddes MacGregor explains that this form of Scottish episcopacy, whose bishops went by the name “superintendents,” was an attempt at preserving the continuing Ecclesia Scoticana. MacGregor writes:

The Ecclesia Scoticana they were bent on restoring was in many ways anomalous and paradoxical.In Columban times, for instance, it had had features that would be inconsistent with modern Presbyterian, Anglican, and Roman practice alike.Its primates, presbyters-abbots, had no commission from Rome; its bishops were nullius dioceseos and subject to the authority of presbyters; its presbyters did not exercise Episcopal functions corporately or otherwise, reserving these strictly to the bishops acting as individuals yet under presbyteral direction.

Corpus Christi, 75

About the Scottish Church at the time of the Reformation he adds:

The notion of a separation from the old Church could not well be in the Scottish Reformers’ minds, since in 1560, of the thirteen Roman Sees, four were vacant officially while five others were for practical purposes vacant, so that apart from questions of ecclesiology, which was still everywhere immature if not inchoate, it would have seemed more natural to the Scottish Reformers to view their action as casting off the Kirk’s bonds than of separating from these.

ibid, 71

Thus the Scottish Church naturally adopted a system of government that it saw as basically consistent with the established order. It rarely had to overthrow powerful Roman bishops. Few were to be found.

MacGregor describes the role of these superintendents in stating:

The superintendents had the pastoral and administrative functions of bishops and were placed over regions described as dioceses; in 1572 the Kirk adopted instead the designation ‘bishops’ and ‘archbishops.’

ibid, 70

He also mentions that Knox was offered an episcopate, but declined due to inopportune circumstances. Knox did not protest another taking the see, however, and indeed it was under Knox that the first Book of Discipline was issued.

Obviously episcopal government is not inconsistent with Reformed theology. The Churches in England and in Hungary retained bishops, and now we see that the Scots did as well, though their form was later changed.

We also begin to see, particularly through a study of Rollock along with the Aberdeen doctors, that a true “moderate” (acknowledging the infelicity of this term) Calvinism existed in Scotland, as well as in England and Germany.

Someone brought this posting to my attention. My reply to him might possibly be of interest:

Thank you for this. Everything in the comment is true, so far as it goes, but one might wish also to add:

(1) that in the Reformed Church that was set up in 1560, it was made clear in the proposed Book of Discipline that there was no difference in “order” between presbyters and bishops/superintendents, and also that superintendents/bishops derived their authority to excercise their ministry of oversight from the Church, and in particular from the General Assembly, and not from their “Order.”

(2) that for some time, decades probably, after 1560 the very act of laying-on of hands in ordinations of presbyters was abandoned in Scotland, and not resumed (on a prescriptive basis at least) until 1610 (cf. the 1560 Book of Discipline, and the works of Gordon Donaldson on the Scottish Reformation). And therefore, that stress on bishops as a desirable and even necessary “office” in the Church did not necessarily entail any belief in the necesssity of any “succession” (episcopal or presbyteral) other than (purported) “succession of doctrine” — this, by the way, was as true of those in England who, from the 1580s onwards (such as John Bridges, Richard Bancroft, Anthony Marten and even [I think] Thomas Bridges) began to defend the legitimacy of bishops from attacks by English presbyterians (such as Thomas Cartwright, John Field, etc.) and to ground their defenses on a “higher” basis than “the will of the prince” (such as Jewel and Whitgift), as it was in Scotland. (One might even argue that a version, however muddled, of this “higher” defense of episcopacy began to be sounded in Scotland even before it was in England, as in the works of Patrick Adamson.)

You might wish to consult *Episcopacy in Scotland: The History of an Idea 1560-1638* by David George Mullan (Edinburgh, 1986: John Donald Publishers Ltd.) on this subject, as well as the various writings of Gordon Donaldson.

You are welcome, if you wish, to post these remarks of mine on “Evangelical Catholicity” if you would think them to be a useful contribution there.

Thanks for your qualifications. I didn’t mean to imply that the Reformed position on bishops was the same as Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox views. The Reformed did not believe that the bishop had a special grace given to him, and this is why the Scots were happy to even change the name to “Superindents.”

(1) that in the Reformed Church that was set up in 1560, it was made clear in the proposed Book of Discipline that there was no difference in “order” between presbyters and bishops/superintendents, and also that superintendents/bishops derived their authority to excercise their ministry of oversight from the Church, and in particular from the General Assembly, and not from their “Order.”

And, I might point out to Dr. Tighe, that Beckwith clearly demonstrates that a similar understanding/practice regarding presbyters and bishops was also present in the early Church long before the deacon-priest-bishop idea of today’s Catholic world became standard fare.

You can be assured that the most of us here understand the difference between Reformed notions of superintendency and what we would consider unreformed deformations of polity. Thus, we would reject any use of a “higher-lower” scale of measurement in which “apostolic succession” via some supposed transmission of a supposed mark on the soul defines “high,” and pragmatic polity defines “low”. We rather see things in terms of degrees of good order, taking into consideration questions of circumstance and utility. As you know, our doctrine of the church is strikingly different from your own: we hold the distinction of the ministry to be of the representative order, and not really different in essence from the universal priesthood of believers. Nevertheless, the idea of a kind of presidency of honor, in which one pastor serves as a regional locus of unity due to the purity of his doctrine, life, and wisdom, has much to recommend it. And this kind of “episcopacy”, founded on character and utility, is what men like Baxter and Bedell, and even Calvin, were interested in pursuing, and is an ideal wholly compatible with the broad Reformed tradition. The mainstream English, “Erastian” (or rather, Lutheran) system of diocesan episcopacy as defended by Cranmer, Jewel, and Hooker, was of a piece with German Protestant systems of the sort expounded by Joachim Stephani, and had nothing really in common with post-Tridentine construals of medieval episcopacy; and, insofar as it made bishops simply inspectors for the State, it also differed from the ideal of pastoral episcopacy-in-synod suggested by Baxter, Bedell, et alia- though in theory, the institutions which follow from those two different ideas need not be competitive, and could even be complementary.

I myself have many times made the point you make here: English defenses of de jure divino episcopacy were a late response to Presbyterian claims of such a warrant for presbyterian polity, in order to meet the Presbyterians on equally impressive ground; and those d.j.d episcopalians, like their presbyterians, veered dangerously from central Magisterial Protestant principles thereby. It is important though to note that even many of the d.j.d episcopalians were still very much Reformed in their doctrine: Saravia, for instance.

You know, to the extent that “paradigm” seems to be associated with “system,” I wonder if it isn’t too flattering to the modern Reformed to even use the word.

It more and more seems like an ad hoc collection of convictions and practices that got suddenly petrified under lava somehow, and is only now being chiseled out. I can’t even understand it.

One question though: by the time of the Assembly, I thought the English Puritans were much less dogmatic against bishops than the Scot’s commissioners. Am I right? It seems almost too weird for them to change so much that they seem incognizant of the shift.

As one reads the minutes of the Assembly, it becomes undeniable that the Confession was not a “hermeneutical presupposition” which the divines took to Scripture, but rather the product of long debates, a few compromises, and keenly-phrased excluders.

To your question about the English and Scots on government, I think it would have to be pointed out that the Scots-Episcopals had pretty much disappeared by that time. The Aberdeen doctors were run out of town, and the new generation were all fisticuff men of the supralapsarian and jure divino variety. The English were definitely the moderates by comparison.

Though of course, you have to remember the context of the WCF was a decidedly anti-royalist one, and thus many of the leader defenders of bishops would not have been able to attend without serious detriment to themselves (like Ussher).

I don’t believe Beckwith’s work was written to outline a pro or con view of Apostolic Succession and I believe it would be a mistake to take two works like that and make a comparison as if one outdid the other. There are of course other proper scholarly treatments of the subject that fall well in line with Beckwith, Burtchaell is one as well as Lightfoot’s appendix to his commentary on Philippians. It’s not like Beckwith’s treatment of the matter stands merely on its own.

No doubt there are other perspectives but Beckwith’s book is a nice short and fair introductory read to the subject that would benefit anyone regardless of their original perspective.

I don’t know if the same can be said for Cirlot though my guess is he argues along certain…well…Orthodox or Catholic lines. Not exactly a Reformed perspective I imagine.

Cirlot was an Anglo-Catholic, whose work is hardly a model of unbiased scholarship. He proceeds by plugging documentary data uncritically into his preconceived system, and he begs the question constantly. Most serious RC historians of the early church nowadays would wince if they thumbed through Cirlot.

Going backwards to undo the spell, most serious RC historians wince at lots of things, not the least of which are Reformed attempts to find their distinctives in Fathers. I fail to see how appealing to them without argument amounts to anything more than an appeal to authority.

I found Cirlot to be quite judicious, and every other person I know, including profesisonal historians, who have read it, think as much.

Kevin,

What other works other than those two that you cite regularly have you read on the matter I wonder. And I am not clear on the relevance of Cirlot not being Reformed. He was a competant scholar nontheless. What matters are the arguments put forward, and not one’s beliefs since the arguments if they are good will be good no matter who articulates them.

I simply submitted reading material from the other side of the issue. It is my firm belief that to make an informed decision people should read the best literature on both sides of an issue as they are able and circumstances allow. If you prefer, please submit works from the other side that you deem comparable in favor of the position you disagree with. In any case, Burtchaell tends to be somewhat anachronistic.

I see your customary lack of civility remains. I realize that this might not have occurred to you, but if you go around suggesting for no apparent reason that people are liars, it really doesn’t speak of well of you. You might want to consider that before behaving in such a way.

And if wish your judgments of what is competent scholarship to be taken seriously, then you might wish to spell the word correctly when making that kind of recommendation.

As for Cirlot, you have attempted to answer my brief critique of him simply by saying that some persons you know who are professional historians (where? and of what? – and is that any less of an appeal to authority than my reference to modern RC historians?) take him seriously. If *everyone* you know who’s read him finds him judicious, then that “everyone” must either be a very small number, or a number of people who think very much alike and probably not much like modern historians do. Cirlot can be taken somewhat seriously as an amasser of documentary bits; but compilation isn’t history, and my critique was that he takes what he finds and assumes it means what he wants it to.

Unless your manners improve, I think there is nothing more to be said between us.

I simply submitted reading material from the other side of the issue. It is my firm belief that to make an informed decision people should read the best literature on both sides of an issue as they are able and circumstances allow

But arguing about this in and of itself was never my point in regards to your comments. There is no “other side” because Beckwith was not speaking in the main contra your side or anyone else’s. Beckwith merely makes plain that the standard assumptions regarding early church polity are something other than historically verifiable and he himself does not weigh in on any side per se. That’s not to say that the conclusions in his book are not valuable for those who would doubt more classic Catholic/Anglo-Catholic or Orthodox renderings of Apostolic Succession.

I haven’t read Cirlot but given that Peter’s description is likely not too far off from the truth of the matter – the difference between Cirlot and Beckwith is merely that Beckwith’s recounting of the early church’s polity is put forward without the clear and express agenda to defend a particular point of view as with most exceptional Anglican historical scholarship. In fact, my guess is that Beckwith hardly writes as a conscious Anglican scholar in the first place but more as a church historian and scholar with little use for the standard theological and other arguments (read: question-begging) surrounding these issues.

That doesn’t of course mean that Beckwith is completely unbiased either in presentation or in his view of the early centuries of the church as biases are present all around. However, Beckwith’s work and presentation does lend itself to a well-considered view of the history that is unfettered by argumentation for a certain point of view (as presumably in Cirlot’s case) that amounts to question-begging and overly circular argumentation with all the documentation provided to substantiate a position already assumed.

In other words, Beckwith’s work is a fine piece of scholarship from the standpoint of doing good history on a subject. This particular subject just happens to be the history of the early church as it pertains to the ministry of the church.

My comments were straightforward and directed to the arguments you gave, not you, so I think you are reading lack of civility into the discusson. I didn’t accuse you of lying. If I had done so, it would be a direct statement-peter you are lying. Generally I don’t accuse people of lying. Rather, I accuse them of making a mistake or being ignorant on some point.

Its a blog and I am dyslexic and I am currently watching three children under the age of 6 so sometimes I mistype.

And given that it is a blog comment, I didn’t think it was necessary to provide a C.V. since you provided no documentation either. So if my comment is vaccuous, then so is your own. Further if my appeal to authority is no different than your own, then my point that your attempt an argument was an appeal to authority was correct. So you admit that your comment was an appeal to authority. So your criticism is only germane if your initial comment was fallacious.

You forget a third possibility, namely that Cirlot is judicious. Cirlot’s book is not a complitation and a good part of the book is argued from his area of expertise, NT scholarship as he was a professor at Nashotah House for a number of years. I believe his degree was from Oxford, but I’d have to check.

As for manners, no matter what I wirte or how I write, you always take it as personal offense. It would be best if you just refrained from making personal judgments and just comment on arguments, as I have tried to do here.

And lastly, you didn’t answer the question. Have you read the book or not?

As I said, there is really nothing more to be said between us. But for the sake of readers, I will address you one last time here.

I’m afraid your defense is unconvincing. To ask if I have actually read a book which I have openly reviewed is tantamount to suggesting that I might be pretending to have read it but haven’t: and such pretension would be lying. But, in case it really isn’t a lack of charity on your part involved here, but rather simply an inability to recognize that if a man reviews a book in his own voice then he is claiming to have read it, I will answer your question: yes, I have the read the book. I was reading Bishop Grafton and Francis Hall on ecclesiology during the same time, and already noting how blinkered and historically unimaginative all their work was compared to German early church historical scholarship of their own day, and also when compared to the RC early church historians of our own time which I had read long before.

Further, this business of accusing others of making personal judgments and claiming that you merely stick faithfully to argument, after you have been called on your misbehavior, is something we’ve seen before. But I think few readers would find the use of phrases such as “going backwards to undo the spell” when answering someone’s remarks to be an example of civil discourse.

Lastly, your remarks about the argument from authority are fairly astonishing coming from someone whom I am given to understand has some training in philosophy. A freshman could see that my question does not in fact constitute an admission that I have made an appeal to authority of the fallacious sort. It doesn’t even imply that you have: it merely suggests that you seem to use a double standard in argument.

Perry, I wish you well, but hard as it might be for you to imagine, I simply have no interest in trying to converse with you, given what I’ve seen so far. However, as I’ve said elsewhere before, if I am somehow misreading you and you are in fact interested in genuine dialogue, please feel free to email me; my address can be gotten from Jonathan Bonomo.

I had a number of reasons for asking if you had read the book. The first was the book unlike Gore’s, The church and the ministry, is not in fact a compilation, but a careful weighing of evidence and analysis. Any peek through the extended table of contents will inform the reader of the same, as well as Cirlot’s interaction with various NT scholars of the middle and latter half of the 20th century. Cirlot in fact says that that is not his project in the first five pages of the book. It is true that the book is an apologetic, but that as Cirlot qualifies it, does not imply that it is not good history. So your take on the book seems not to match the way the book is written.

Second, I didn’t know if your comments were from a review or from actually reading the book, especially since they seemed so dismissive, I was inclined to think the former.

As for the fallacy I have a bit more than “some” training in philosophy and your reference to contemporary RC historians does in my judgment smack of an appeal to authority. Why not skip the reference and give an example of a non-truth preserving inference upon which Cirlot’s case swung?

The comment about going backwards was a liteary allusion to Kierkegaard. Perhaps you haven’t read much Kiekegaard. Many people have not. That is all it was. A literary allusion and not a personal slight.

I have no wish to converse with you, which is why I didn’t post this on RefCath. I simply pointed to some literature that wasn’t the stock two sources that Kevin Johnson proffers whenever the subject comes up.

You regularly post those two sources as something akin to the definitive proof that Apostolic Succession is silly, stupid and otherwise unsupported belief. I posted a source to expand the bibliography. Hence whatever the books may be in themselves, you deploy them for that apologetic and rhetorical purpose.

There consequently is an other side, both in terms of apologetic as well as in terms the weighing of the evidence. Further, I seriously doubt that it is possible to do history without theological assumptions (read: epistemic neutrality). History and historiography is not a non-theory laden practice. As Cirlot was an Anglican as well as a good scholar, any casual reading of his works will bear the marks of precision and dispassion which are hallmarks of Anglican scholarship.

I didn’t ask you to read Cirlot’s book. I simply posted it for readers who may wish to read something else that comes to a different conclusion other than the two sources you regularly post. If you don’t wish to read the book, that is fine as is Peter’s dismissal of the book. The arguments of the text stand or fall on their own merits.

I have nothing further to say Mr Robinson, but it is worth pointing out, as an example of his method, that his claim that his allusion to Kierkegaard was not offensive is dubious. He was alluding to an expression of K’s which means a cure for spiritual malady; to call one’s critique of another’s argument “going backward to undo the spell” is thereby to suggest that one is curing spiritual malady with one’s response. I trusted that most readers would see this at once: but since Mr Robinson has made the allusion explicit and then suggested that it is innocent ornament, I thought it best to clarify matters in case some readers are in fact unfamiliar with the phrase.

Actually it wasn’t. I have used the allusion to denote going backwards. That’s all. If you doubt me, ask Arin. I haven’t developed any “tough guy” persona. I think you are reading into the text a lot more than is there.

I stumbled across this post on Google, and thought it was probably worth noting that the Aberdeen Doctors were deposed for refusing to sign the *National Covenant* of 1638 rather than the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 (though I’m sure they would have refused to sign that as well!)

The General Assembly set up a committee to investigate them in 1641. William Guild was the only one of the six to recant (eventually) and sign. If you’ve got access to Early English Books Oline, you can follow their sometimes turgid literary debate with the Presbyterian Alexander Henderson.

I agree with William Tighe that David Mullan’s book on Episcopacy in Scotland is the best one on the subject — not least because it gives you some sense of the recent scholarly debates on the subject — like the one between Gordon Donaldson and James Kirk on the understanding of the “episkope” exercised by the superintendants between 1560 and 1572.

Another comment, while I’m at it…

A careful reading of Trent shows that Trent never committed itself to whether the presbyterate and episcopate were separate “orders” (as apposed to “grades” or “degrees” within a single order of “sacerdotium” or priesthood).

The independently-minded French episcopate favoured the view that the two were separate orders since this helped bolster the claim the bishops exercised their authority de iure divino did not simply act as delegates of the papacy.

Papalists, on the other hand, tended to advocate a kind of RC presbyterianism, which treated bishops as presbyters elevated to a special “gradus” within the “sacerdotium” by the authority of the pope. They conceded that the “sacerdotium” and the threefold ministry of bishops, presbyters and deacons had been instituted de iure divino, but argued that the authority of bishops did not come immediately from God, but mediately through the Petrine ministry.

As with many controverted issues, Trent carefully avoided adjudicating between these two positions.

I’m assuming you’re the Bucer scholar Nick Thompson? If so, let me say how much I enjoy your work. In any case, welcome.

You are quite right about Trent. But my earlier mention of “post-Tridentine construals of episcopacy” refers to the mainstream RC positions *after* Trent, hence the “post-“, and was not intended as a commentary upon Trent itself; what I was concerned with was not so much the doctrine of order (under which the question of whether priests and bishops are one order or two would fall), but rather, with the doctrine of ordination, the controverted idea of “priesthood”.

My point was that the “Erastian” English system of diocesan episcopacy was much along the lines of the German Protestant Superintendency theorized by J. Stephani, and did not at all involve a doctrine of conferred higher participation in the priesthood of Christ, a supposed indelible change and mark upon the soul conferred by ordination: which was (and technically still is) the RC doctrine. Whether bishops and priests are essentially one order or two makes no difference in this respect.

Those later English churchmen who did argue for de jure divino episcopacy tended to read history as the Gallicans did with regard to the distinction of episcopacy; but even those Englishmen didn’t believe that priesthood in the Roman sense was involved- the Gallicans, though, generally did; so the similarity between the two views was largely specious.

As you note, the Papalists- most notably the Jesuits- did often promote something like a presbyterianism plus mono-episcopacy, with Pope and priesthood being the two real sacerdotal offices. The English political theologians (if it is not too anachronistic to call them that), were quick to make the point that the Papalist position was anti-episcopal; but for the English, this was inextricably bound up with the perception that the Papalist position was anti-royalist; and that, really, was what mattered the most. And this anti-royalism was what many of the 17th c English conforming political theologians saw as the common- and objectionable- feature of both Papalism and Scots Presbyterianism. But you know all this; I am simply making clarifications here for readers’ sake.

That’s very kind of you both. I was really pleased to discover that someone in cyberspace was writing something about the Aberdeen Doctors (how I came across this blog). They’re not even that well known in Scotland.

If anyone is ever looking for a research topic in 17th cent. Reformed Theology, there’s a lot of work to be done on John Forbes of Corse in particular.

The only obstacle is that he did all his non-controversial theology in Latin and no-one has translated it yet.

[…] I seem to be all about quoting others, but when the goods are there, they’re worth quoting: The earliest Scottish Reformed churches had an episcopal polity. Under the influence of Andrew Melville this was briefly dropped, but shortly thereafter it was […]